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Mark Zuckerberg to build Iron Man inspired AI assistant

If you were feeling pleased with your New Year's Resolutions, you may want to stop reading now. Forget going to the gym more, saving money or quitting smoking -- they all pale in the face of Mark Zuckerberg's recently announced plans to build his own AI 'butler'.

Writing on his personal Facebook page, Zuckerberg described his potential AI helper as "like Jarvis from Iron Man". "Every year, I take on a personal challenge to learn new things and grow outside my work at Facebook," he wrote. "My challenges in recent years have been to read two books every month, learn Mandarin and meet a new person every day. "My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work. You can think of it like Jarvis in Iron Man".

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Using technology that is "already out there", Zuckerberg plans to teach the system voice control in order to control the music, lights and temperature of his home. Zuckerberg also hopes to teach the system facial recognition for friends and family and to detect changes in his infant daughter's room.

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Work wise, Zuckerberg hopes that the system will help him "visualise data in VR to help me build better services... and lead my organisations more effectively".

Building things for Facebook and for Internet.org, Facebook's plan to bring affordable Internet to less developed countries, is "rewarding work", says Zuckerberg. But it's a "different kind of reward to build things yourself". "This year's theme is invention".